Sarah Moss

Ally is intelligent, studious and engaged in a losing battle to gain her mother's approval and affection. Her mother, Elizabeth, is a religious zealot, keener on saving prostitutes than on embracing the challenges of motherhood. Even when Ally wins a scholarship and is accepted as one of the first female students to read medicine in London, it still doesn't seem good enough.

Six archaeologists on a summer dig in Greenland hear that a killer plague has swept the planet. As the Arctic winter approaches they write letters to their loved ones, not knowing if they are dead or alive. These letters chart their descent into panic and superstition and highlight the fragility of the human condition.

Teenage Silvie and her parents are living in a hut in Northumberland as an exercise in experimental archaeology. Her father is obsessed with imagining and enacting the harshness of Iron Age life. Silvie is haunted by the story of a bog girl, a young woman sacrificed by those closest to her. The landscape both keeps and reveals the secrets of past violence and ritual as the summer builds to its harrowing climax.

The discovery of a baby's skeleton on a remote Scottish island unearths long-buried secrets in this darkly comic, atmospheric novel from the author of the acclaimed 'Cold Earth'. (8776)